Search Results

This chapter relates how the Federal Writers’ Project decided to conduct and collect interviews with ex-slaves. It closely examines federal and state directors’ administrative correspondence regarding the Ex-Slave Project, and the instructions federal directors such as Henry Alsberg, John Lomax, and Sterling Brown issued to state directors and project employees for interviewing and writing up the WPA slave narratives. It explores the editorial conflicts that ensued over the meaning and significance of African cultural survivals, black folklore, and how to transcribe “Negro dialect.” It argues that federal guidelines intended to prevent literary minstrelsy became the standard for establishing the authenticity of the narratives, and wound up de-familiarizing black speech and reinforcing notions of racial difference. The increasing emphasis on African survivals, black folklore, and “Negro dialect” shifted the project’s focus from documenting ex-slave testimony to colorful representations of black culture and ex-slaves for a presumed white readership.

The book’s conclusion makes an implicit call for a more nuanced genealogy connecting representations of black folklore in the post-Reconstruction era to what are typically considered the more “sophisticated” treatments of folklore in later African American literary and ethnographic works, suggesting a shared set of interests and concerns in writers from Paul Laurence Dunbar, to Zora Neale Hurston, to Ralph Ellison, to Colson Whitehead, and beyond. This approach beckons us to recover another layer in the sophisticated and nuanced ways folklore and African American literature have intersected, not just in the post-Reconstruction period, or even in the Harlem Renaissance period and beyond, but indeed from the very foundations of the African American literary tradition.

This chapter examines how the showcasing of black folklore in San Antón requires work and ideological maneuvering. Dynamics of representation of “community” varied a great deal depending on whether such public events were organized for residents or for a broader national audience. Local events such as Christmas dinners, Mother's Day celebrations, and Father's Day celebrations were mostly organized around religious activities, family oriented or preestablished holidays. In contrast, public events targeted to an outside audience centered on Afro-Puerto Rican or Afro-Antillean music and predominantly bomba and plena. The chapter then illustrates that far from being “in the blood” or neutral and carefree or an externally motivated process, the marking and celebration of San Antón as place of black folklore is driven by the community itself in a way that requires a great deal of work and the assertive leadership of community members from within.

This chapter discusses one of Burnett’s major achievements and the first of his films to be made under relatively normal Hollywood production circumstances. To Sleep with Anger tells the story of generational and class conflict within a black family in Los Angeles. Retired worker Gabriel and his wife, Susie, are visited by Harry, an old friend from the south, who becomes a houseguest. Soon after Harry’s arrival, strange things begin to happen. Gabriel falls ill, and his youngest son falls under Harry’s bad influence.